The densely populated coastal corridors from Boston to Washington and from
San Diego to Berkeley are where most of America's big decisions are made.

They remind us of two quite different Americas: one country along these
coasts and everything else in between. Those in Boston, New York and
Washington determine how our government works; what sort of news, books,
art and fashion we should consume; and whether our money and investments
are worth anything.

The Pacific corridor is just as influential, but in a hipper, cooler
fashion. Whether America suffers through another zombie film or one more
Lady Gaga video or Kanye West's latest soft-porn rhyme is determined by
Hollywood -- mostly by executives who live in the la-la land of the thin
Pacific strip from Malibu to Palos Verdes.

The next smart phone or search engine 5.0 will arise from the minds of
tech geeks who pay $2,000 a month for studio apartments and drive BMWs in
Menlo Park, Palo Alto or Mountain View.

The road to riches and influence, we are told, lies in being branded with
a degree from a coastal-elite campus like Harvard, Yale, Princeton,
Stanford or Berkeley. How well a Yale professor teaches an 18-year-old in
a class on American history does not matter as much as the fact that the
professor helps to stamp the student with the Ivy League logo. That mark
is the lifelong golden key that is supposed to unlock the door to coastal
privilege.

Fly over or drive across the United States, and the spatial absurdity of
this rather narrow coastal monopoly is immediately apparent to the naked
eye. Outside of these power corridors, our vast country appears pretty
empty. The nation's muscles that produce our oil, gas, food, lumber,
minerals and manufactured goods work unnoticed in this sparsely settled
fly-over expanse.

People rise each morning in San Francisco and New York and count on
plentiful food, fuel and power. They expect service in elevators to limos
that are mostly made elsewhere by people of the sort they seldom see and
don't really know -- other than to influence through a cable news show, a
new rap song, the next federal health-care mandate or more phone apps.

In California, whether farms receive contracted irrigation water, whether
a billion board feet of burned timber will be salvaged from the recent
Sierra Nevada forest fires, whether a high-speed-rail project obliterates
thousands of acres of ancestral farms, whether gas will be fracked, or
whether granite should be mined to make tony kitchen counters is all
determined largely by coastal elites who take these plentiful resources
for granted. Rarely, however, do they see how their own necessities are
procured. Instead, they feel deeply ambivalent about the grubbier people
and culture that made them.

In Kansas or Utah, people do not pay $1,000 per square foot for their
homes as they do on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. They do not gossip
with the people who write their tax laws, as is common in the Georgetown
area of Washington. Those in the empty northern third of California do not
see Facebook or Oracle founders at the local Starbucks any more than they
bump into the Kardashians at a hip bistro.

The problem is not just that the coasts determine how everyone else is to
lead their lives, but that those living in our elite corridors have no
idea about how life is lived just a short distance away in the interior --
much less about the sometimes tragic consequences of their own therapeutic
ideology on the distant, less influential majority.

In a fantasy world, I would move Washington, D.C., to Kansas City,
Missouri. That transfer would not only make the capital more accessible to
the American people and equalize travel requirements for our legislators,
but also expose an out-of-touch government to a reality outside its
Beltway.

I would transfer the United Nations to Salt Lake City, where foreign
diplomats would live in a different sort of cocoon.

I would ask billionaires like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and the Koch
Brothers to endow with their riches a few Midwestern or Southern
universities. Perhaps we could create a new Ivy League in the nation's
center.

I would suggest to Facebook and Apple that they relocate operations to
North Dakota to expose their geeky entrepreneurs to those who drive trucks
and plow snow. Who knows -- they might be able to afford a house, get
married before 35, and have three rather than zero kids.

America is said to be divided by red and blue states, rich and poor, white
and non-white, Christian and non-Christian, old and new.

I think the real divide is between those who make our decisions on the
coasts and the anonymous others who live with the consequences somewhere
else.